WARNING, this turned out to be pretty long rant, longer than I originally thought.

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Allright, so I bought an Asus Vivotab RT for my wife as a Mothers Day present. Previously I had warned her against it but she was quite sure she wanted a windows tablet. I thought it cannot be really that bad, at least HW wise Asus seemes to be pretty decent and I had prior experience on Asus Nexus7 which is a good value for a tablet.

The first impression of the thing was pretty nice, It's a solid build, feels nicely balanced on hands and the specs are OK.

On first turning it ON, however it threw a "GPF: Windows has encountered an internal error and has to shut down",
"You may need to reinstall some components".
WTF, I just turned this darn thing ON, how on earth do I reinstall it???

Well, the second time was successful, and it went to the startup routine, asking all kinds of questions and setting up the accounts.
During the end of the setup, however it gave another GPF. Luckily that was also solved with a reboot.
(When I talked to people about that, some thought that this looks fairly normal, and that maybe some people EXPECT windows to throw GPF's now and then...)

OK; I have never used the Metro UI before, and it DOES look and feel really odd first, but it's not that bad, its pretty responsive to use but I'd only expect that given the device is pretty powerful.
It takes some time to get used to but I don't think thr UI itself is evil.

So, one of the reasons she wanted windows tab, was that one popular televsion internet channel in finland, MTV3-Katsomo uses a proprietary interface that requires you to have Silverlight on your your device to watch the content, thing which bugs her as she uses an Ubuntu laptop normally. So, I figured that since it's an windows device, surely Microsoft internal protocols are implemented on it. Boy was I wrong there.

It turns out there's no Silverlight for WIN8RT, and nor is there Java. (some sites she uses have Java components...)
As far as I know either of those are not coming there, ever!

OK, lets forget Java for a minute, maybe you can install an another browser to the tablet, Chrome for instance? No way, you cannot and propably never will. You are stuck with IE forever

Actually there's some specific loophole built for Apple devices to use the MTV3-Katsomo site, and also an experimental GW for Android devices but guess what, none that works for Windows

My woes ended not here... She was going on a trip and wanted to have videoes for the device, to watch during the flight. I spent 2 full days trying to transcode videos from our DVB-box to a format that the poor tablet could digest... Imagine a device meant mainly for video consumption, it cannot play simple MPEG2 videos, not PES, PS, TS, nada!!
Finally managed to use some MPEG4/AVI-wrapper combination that it played, but at an ugly resolution
I tried installing alternate Video Player applications, but they are more or less useless. I tried several free ones and even 2 paid apps, but they are as clueless as the default Media Player on video formats. None of them can even recognize normal VOB from a DVD!!!

Well, sure you can BUY videos from the MS Store, right? Tried to get something for her to watch; OK, there's "Life Of Pi", prized something like £9,99 or so... Hmm, pounds, why on earth?
Turns out when she first activated the device she incorrectly selected UK as the location, and you had to create an somebody@outlook.com address to make the account...
Well, no problem, but when I try to buy the video, I am prompted to make an XBOX-Live account?? HUHUU, I already have an MS account now for the store, why do I need another?
Well, I create it and sure, it asks for my location and now I set it to "Finland". After that, I hit "Purchase" and guess, what, the bloody thing complains my location is wrong

I could not find an easy way to modify either of the accounts, it well might be you cannot change your location once you are done with account setup. So, no videos for the tablet.

Now, as I have undrerstood that WP8 is pretty much same as WIN8RT, is that really so, is the phone OS as useless, strange, crazy and cludegy as this? Are the Lumias similar to this Vivotab?
I am amazed, please tell me I have done something wrong, surely?